I've loved Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 was an amazing experience, and so was Mass Effect 3, until the ending. I'm sorry to say the Extended Cut did little alleviate my aching, and in my case actually made it worse. I'll explain:
Destroy Ending, met EMT requirements for breath scene. During the non-EC playthrough, EDI comes out of the Normandy, in Destroy ending. Even if she didn't the fact that Shepard breather gave me the hope of calling a bluff on the Catalyst. The EC smashed that hope to pieces by making EDI die and the Geth be wiped out definitive.
The end result of that is that I feel blackmailed to kill my Shepard through a Control or Synthesis ending, or invalidate my previous playthroughs. I played Mass Effect 2, laboriously getting all DLC's done, the suicide mission with all survivors, and having enough Paragon to resolve conflicts. That Mass Effect 2 play figured into my ability to have Geth/Quarian peace, which would have not been possible in a fresh ME3 game. I had to work for it, and I had to work to see EDI's growth as well as legion from mere AI to actualized individuals.
The endings made me feel punished for wanting my Shepard to live and reunite with his love interest, because doing so made Geth/Quarian peace gameplay efforts moot, and I myself killed one of my crew and wiped out an entire race as a tacked on price to the ONLY ending where my Shepard can live. And the payoff? A heaving chest and my LI just looking up while holding a placard.
EDI and the Geth's death is different from that of Mordin or Thane. I would not have minded if they had died in the line of duty. But they didn't die in the line of duty or from natural causes -- I murdered EDI and the Geth because they were made narrative hostages to artificially balance ending choices.
I get the feeling developers feared people would easily choose the one ending where Shepard lived if the other 3 (new Refusal) had him dying. So, they tacked on a cost of your crew and an entire race to make it seem "difficult". The only way a choice was made difficult is by choosing the less aggravating ending, because the end result of these available endings is that none are particularly uplifting to me. I have had enough sorrow in my life -- "bittersweet" doesn't speak to me.
Were my expectations really wrong? In both Mass Effect 1/2 I had the option to work hard to get uplifting endings. In the third, I import that hard work, and put in even more hard work into the third installment, only to see that work just determines how much is destroyed. I have no hope of uplifting resolution. Either my heroic avatar dies and is separated from his love interest and trusty crew, or he lives and wipes out a race on of his crew sacrificed for, while killing another crew member that happened to be the love interest of another crew mate (Joker).
Mass Effect is all about Shepard and your crew. That's what you have emotional proximity and investment with. I'm very sensitive to any situation revolving around my crew, and the endings were brutal one way or the other to this crew. The endings don't leave me admiring the future -- they leave my throat hurting at the mortification of a somber closure to a very important chapter of my gaming life.
What's worse, it seems they went out of their way with favoring the Synthesis ending. It becomes an Utopia, and has perks over all others with the slides showing Kasumi reuniting with Keiji. Yet the costs are so basic -- kill someone in your crew, whether it be Shepard or EDI and Legion's dream. Mac Walters had said EDI might survive. What happened? Why the change of mind?
Either way, I'm deflated. I won't say outright that I will not buy further Bioware products, because I've had good experiences with Dragon Age and most of Mass Effect. The quality of production is superb. But I don't play games and invest so many years in a franchise to be depressed. And if depressing is the artistic choice of the team for any of its games, then I'm afraid I'd rather skip on the self-flagellation.
At the very least Bioware could have done better to signal to customers that the first two installments they had bought would have tragic conclusions so we didn't have to invest in the wrong game. The way the first two games allowed me to have a happy ending leave me sucker punched by the third.
I know some might feel differently, and I am deeply saddened that this is the final resolution we will get from the developers. I wanted to remember Mass Effect, not have to mentally edit my memories of the game to black out the endings and try to remember the game moments before they were marred with the available unforgiving resolutions.
I'll probably need some time to recover from the morale killer these endings have been. The EC brought other beautiful moments like the conduit run LI scenes, with Kaidan finally telling my John Sheppard he loved him back. But all that is severely lessened by the final outcome, where if I finally want to have a life with my LI I have to murder very dear crew and wipe out an entire race that had just been redeemed, or widow Kaidan to keep them alive.
I didn't want to come off entitled, but why? Why is it so terrible that I be allowed to work for an ending where my Shepard lives and EDI doesn't die? Is it really such a threat to the integrity of the story?
Modifié par Lucrece, 06 juillet 2012 - 04:59 .
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